D’Souza’s Trojan Horse — VOICES for REASON

Many answers have been offered to the question: who is the enemy that struck us on 9/11 — and why? You may remember hearing suggestions that the attackers should be regarded as deranged criminals; or, that the terrorists were driven by poverty and frustration; or, that they are a band of “Islamofascists.” The answer you accept will shape your conclusion about what must be done to defend our lives and freedom. For example, if you think the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon were criminal acts, one practical implication is to round up the ringleader and his minions and put them on trial before a judge (which is what happened after the first attack on the WTC in 1993). But my view is that nearly eight years after 9/11, Americans still lack a correct picture of what we’re up against, and that this has subverted our security. The problem is not merely that we lack a clear idea of the enemy; we’ve been deluged with a host of bizarre and false explanations.

Into that category I put the account offered by Dinesh D’Souza in his book, The Enemy at Home. It purports to guide thoughtful Americans on protecting their nation from further such outbreaks of Islamist hatred. Reading the book, I could feel my blood boiling. On finishing the book I began making notes for a scathing review, but soon realized that in a crucial respect D’Souza’s book was not really about its ostensible subject.

It’s bad enough that the book purveys falsehoods that will cloud people’s understanding of the threat; but worse still is the fact that the book’s pretense at dealing with this burning national security issue is simply a way of marketing D’Souza’s “solution” — his ominous domestic political agenda. The book, in a sense, is a kind of intellectual trial balloon for an unAmerican political program. D’Souza’s agenda, as it emerges from his pages, is a thinly disguised attempt to establish religion as the central integrating principle of American society.

Far from guiding us on how to combat Islamists such as the Taliban, the book would have us reshape America into a Taliban-esque society.

My primary goal in this post and the subsequent ones that follow it is not to review the book (to do that, I think, would grant it an undeserved respect) but rather to look at its main point and consider its wider political implications.

Let me start by briefly peeling away the book’s outer skin to get a sense for how its main explanatory claims operate. Next, I’ll discuss the reception of the book by D’Souza’s fellow conservatives, because I think that portends important long-range implications for the conservative movement in America — and for the future of American culture.

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When The Enemy at Home was published, it made a huge splash. D’Souza is a prominent and celebrated conservative author, so his work received a great deal of attention in the media. What struck me (and many of the reviewers) is that the book is riddled with shoddy research, factual fudging, and outright distortions regarding the Islamist movement. D’Souza bends the facts, and omits inconvenient ones, to fit his preconceived conclusion. A number of intelligent reviewers — e.g., Scott Johnson in The New Criterion; Robert Spencer, in FrontPage Magazine; Andrew Sullivan, in The New Republic — have painstakingly autopsied the book’s tendentious argument and factual claims. I’ll just touch on a few in the course of summarizing his argument.

The book opens with an outlandish conclusion — that “[t]he cultural left in this country is responsible for causing 9/11.” How does D’Souza attempt to justify that? By industrious cherry-picking of evidence, coupled with a profound sympathy for religious fundamentalism.

D’Souza insistently brushes off the notion that Islamic religious doctrine has motivated terrorism. He ignores such awkward facts as jihadist recruiters’ frequent citation of Koranic verses promising an exalted place in an afterworld to those who “kill and are killed” for Allah, and the historic role of jihad in motivating Mohammad’s warriors to conquer so much land and to kidnap, enslave and slaughter so many along the way. He then frames terrorist jihad as a modern phenomenon:

Despite the religious enthusiasm of many suicide bombers, Islam has been around for more than a thousand years, and for most of its history it produced neither suicide attackers nor terrorists. It is only contemporary Islam that provides an inspiration to suicide missions and attacks on civilians.

D’Souza needs this to be true, in order to conjure up some plausibility for his central claim: that Islamic terrorism is a reaction to the ideas, policies and doctrines of America’s cultural left. He fingers a broad group of provocateurs, including Ted Kennedy, Noam Chomsky, Michael Moore, Barbra Streisand, the New York Times, and the ACLU. By D’Souza’s lights, jihadists launch terrorist attacks against us not to impose a Muslim theocracy, but simply to preserve a decent culture with legitimate “traditional” values. Muslims across the world, he contends, are offended at our irreligious society, laws, and culture, and desire simply to shield themselves against the corruption of their ideals. D’Souza would have us believe that Islamic terrorism is some sort of excessive, but at its source justifiable, cultural self-defense by an affronted people.

This is why D’Souza complains that the Wahhabi strain of Islam, the totalitarian ideology of Saudi Arabia and the wellspring of much Islamist terrorism, has gotten a bad rap. “This may come as news to some conservatives, but Wahhabi Islam is not a breeding ground of Islamic radicalism,” D’Souza writes. “It is a breeding ground of Islamic obedience. The essence of the Wahhabi doctrine is doctrinal and social conservatism.”

It is an analogous lack of “social conservatism” in America today that provokes D’Souza’s disgust — and it is here that the author’s real agenda begins to poke through the flimsy pretense at counseling on national security.

We’ll look at that agenda in subsequent posts.